Entertainment for replicants

Rating: 2/10 (23 September 2007)

I caught THE ISLAND on a movie channel and boy what a vivid sense of deja vu I had.The whole thing is just a mish mash of a dozen movies combined unconvincingly and the end product is a pretty hollow cinematic experience. LOGAN'S RUN, BLADE RUNNER, THX 1138 are just some of the movies this Michael Bay epic freely rips off from. There's a scene in THE ISLAND that's virtually identical to a scene in BLADE RUNNER. I was shocked when I saw it. No one sued?
What's truly shocking about this film (or I should call "product") is not the obvious borrowing of ideas from other famous and not so famous films (such as PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR, for example) but the mechanical way the entire thing is made. Michael Bay wouldn't know how to create an authentic moment if his life depended on it. The whole thing is so depressing. The many ideas and concepts, which could have been profound and meaningful, were absurdly glossed over for simplistic action plot points. The clichés were free flowing: scenes like the "I'm the real Tom Lincoln" part were cringe worthy. We've seen this happen a million times. In fact, I recently saw GOLIATH VS THE VAMPIRES and there's an identical "who is the bad/good character" moment in that film made in the early 1960s. Nice to see that things haven't changed much in the last 45 years.
There's absolutely nothing fresh in THE ISLAND. It's just a very elaborate and pointless excuse for stupid and overdone action scenes. The moment when the two characters hang to dear life on that logo outside a skyscraper (which, btw, is almost identical to the one in TOMORROW NEVER DIES) is so unrealistic and cartoonish that I thought I was watching a movie directed by McG (the director of the CHARLIE'S ANGELS movies). After that scene, the film never really recovered from total schlocky absurdity.
The actors are totally wasted. Djimon Hounsou's entire screen appearance is in slow motion. Probably a first in cinematic history for a major actor!
THE ISLAND is just one of the many patently bad movies made and released from Hollywood these days which is basically heralding the death of cinema.